Geneservice and DNAFORM Enter into Exclusive Distribution Agreements

Geneservice Ltd (GSL) of Cambridge England, and Kabushiki Kaisha DNAFORM, of Tokyo Japan, have announced exclusive distribution agreements whereby GSL and DNAFORM will jointly distribute FANTOM™ clones developed by RIKEN as well as other unique genomic resources created by international research institutions like the NIH.

This strategic alliance will give the international life science community access to the largest collection of cDNA and genomic clone resources from key model organisms such as human, mouse, rat, primate, C. elegans, Drosophila, and Xenopus.

"We are excited at the prospect of Geneservice partnering with KK DNAFORM for the ability to combine our clone collections with the impressive resources from RIKEN, and expanding our territorial reach into Asia," said Tom Weaver, CEO for Geneservice.

KK DNAFORM, which is actively working on exploiting the RIKEN cDNA library technology, for which it holds exclusive patents, also welcomed this partnership.

"We see this strategic alliance as a way to rapidly increase our product portfolio offered in Japan and other Asian countries, and to effectively market our RIKEN FANTOMTM Clones particularly in the EU," stressed Hirohumi Ujita, KK DNAFORM’s CEO.

The alliance was also welcomed by members of the research community, and recognized as a step forward to increase the awareness about these clone collections in the public domain, and to make them accessible for researches.

Professor Yoshihide Hayashizaki, Project Director of the Genome Exploration Research Group at RIKEN, commented, "This partnership is really very important to us, and we are hoping that it will give more researches access to our FANTOM Clones."

"Moreover, it is good to know that for the first time a clone provider in Japan will offer all the clones from the international genome projects."

Marc Vidal from the DFCI added, "The new paradigm of genomics and systems biology requires the creation of genome-wide clone resources."

"It is essential that international efforts like this take place to make such valuable resources available to the research community, in particular in Asia where a dedicated clone provider was missing."

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